Last updated: 21 September 2026
Bàrdachd collects nothing.
That is the whole policy, but the App Store requires it spelled out, and a one-line answer to a serious question deserves the detail behind it.
Your poems, the corrections you make to how a word scans, and anything you add to the reading, websites and listening lists are kept in a database inside the app’s own container on your device.
There is no Bàrdachd account, no Bàrdachd server, and no sign-in. Nobody, including the developer, can see what you write.
Your poems also go to your own iCloud account, so the same poems are on your iPhone, your iPad and your Mac. This happens automatically when you are signed in to iCloud on the device; there is nothing to switch on.
They go into your account’s private database. Apple encrypts it, the developer has no access to it and no way to ask for access, and no other user of Bàrdachd can reach it. The syncing is between your own devices and your own iCloud; nobody else is party to it.
If you are not signed in to iCloud, or you turn iCloud Drive off for Bàrdachd in your device’s Settings, the app keeps working and everything stays on that device.
If you have iCloud Backup switched on, your device may also include the app’s data in your own encrypted backup. Both that and the sync above are Apple’s services under your own Apple Account, covered by Apple’s privacy policy rather than this one.
The scansion engine, the rhyme finder, the pronunciation dictionary of 126,000 words, and the thirteen fixed forms with their guidance are all carried inside the app. None of that needs a network connection, and none of it makes one.
There is one other exception, and it is barely one. The reference lists — further reading, websites, listening — hold links, and tapping Open hands that address to your browser in the ordinary way. At that point you have left Bàrdachd and you are on a website, and what that site collects is theirs to describe. Nothing about you or about the app is added to the request.
Exporting a poem as plain text or PDF uses the standard iOS share sheet, so the file goes wherever you choose to send it and nowhere else. The app does not send it anywhere itself, and has no idea where it went.
Bàrdachd has no accounts, no messaging, no user-generated content visible to anyone else, and no purchases. It collects nothing from anyone of any age.
If this ever stops being true, the policy will be updated before the change ships, and the date at the top will say when. A policy that describes some other version of the app is a false statement about this one.
Questions about privacy, or about the app: 88_intake.troupes@icloud.com